A Lot More
Observations on housing's wreckage and recovery
A glimpse of Gale Cincotta
The soul and conscience of Our Lot is Gale Cincotta, who was a 1960s Chicago housewife when her efforts to improve her sons’ school led her into much bigger battles over the forces besieging city neighborhoods back then – namely the refusal of banks to make home mortgage loans and a misguided, criminally executed effort by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to remedy that problem. In the early 1970s, that government program sparked a feeding frenzy among real estate agents and lenders for the hundreds of millions of dollars in insured loan money it unleashed; like locusts, they left husks of houses in their wake, devastating city neighborhoods across the country.
As the book chronicles, by the mid 1970s Cincotta became a national player, a central figure behind landmark regulatory reforms – the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and then the Community Reinvestment Act – that exposed and then discouraged discrimination in lending. I found this picture of her in the archives of the Pratt Center for Community Development, a wonderful Brooklyn-based organization I consult for, from a 1991 conference Pratt hosted. A few great photos of Cincotta turned up in the course of my research, especially at the National Training and Information Center, the organization she co-founded, but was disappointed to find very little video footage of her in action. If anyone out there has any, let me know!!
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How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and the United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.
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Its unbelievable how you can spin Gale Cincotta. Through thuggery that would make a union boss blush, she coerced banks into making loans to people with no ability to pay them back.
Banks are not racist, they’re greedy. If minorities and poor people could demonstrate their ability to repay their debts as well as middle-class America, they would get the same deals.
Can you not see what you support? These people get the loans, go belly up, get foreclosed on and the same middle-class real estate investor buys the house from the bank.
Now the poor person is back to renting, but this time they have a foreclosure on their record. How does that help them?
Some people do not deserve a mortgage, plain and simple, no matter what color they are.
Get a clue.